Page 27 - Volume 13 Number 12

Airmaster! (Part One)
by Edward H. Phillips
In 1933 Dwane L. Wallace and his brother Dwight resurrected the Cessna Aircraft Company, launched the new Model C-34 and restored their uncle Clyde V. Cessna as president of the company that bore his name.
Four years after the devastating stock market crash of 1929, the United States was slowly beginning to emerge from the depths of the worst economic debacle in the nation’s history. Still, tens of millions of people remained unemployed, thousands of banks had shut their doors, soup kitchens were overwhelmed and obituaries of suicidal millionaires gone broke littered the newspapers.
In November 1932, President Herbert Hoover had been kicked out of the White House by the American people in a landslide election. They replaced him with the charismatic governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and Roosevelt was intent on living up to that musical motto by getting the United States back on its financial feet.
Meanwhile, out west in Wichita, Kansas, the once­ mighty “Air Capital of the World” had been reduced to little more than a shadow of its former self. Only the Stearman Aircraft Company had managed to barely survive the slaughter of Wall Street that began in October 1929, thanks largely to subcontract work from the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, Washington. Curtiss­Wright had padlocked the Travel Air Company’s factory in 1931, and in 1932 the board of directors booted Clyde Cessna out of the company that bore his name.
Amid all of that misfortune, a young man from Belmont, Kansas, decided to attend Wichita University and major in aeronautical engineering. He was a favorite nephew of none other than pioneer aviator Clyde Vernon Cessna himself, and his famous uncle was the first to give him a ride in an airplane and strongly encouraged the lad to pursue his dream of flying. After graduating
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in May 1933 with sheepskin in hand, Dwane L. Wallace set about trying to find a job as an aeronautical engineer. Mac Short, chief engineer at the Stearman Aircraft Company, had to turn him away, so he went to see Walter Beech but suffered the same results.
Wallace, however, was relentless. Finally, Beech’s chief engineer Ted Wells put Dwane on the skinny payroll at a very meager salary as the third member of Beech Aircraft Company’s engineering department. Dwane assisted Wells and Jack Wassal performing drafting and stress analysis before moving up to engineering projects for the Model B17L and the mighty, 710­horsepower A17F.
Although Wallace was thankful to have a job in aviation, he wanted to do more than work in his uncle Clyde’s silent factory – he wanted to resurrect it, to bring it back to life again. During the summer and autumn 1933 he began plotting a three­point course of action: First, wrest power from the Cessna Aircraft Company board of directors and shareholders. Second, invite Clyde Cessna to be an active participant in the new venture. Third, design an airplane that would sell in a severely depressed marketplace.
For months he and his older brother Dwight, a highly respected attorney, held discussions with Mr. Cessna. The elder Wallace knew how to handle the legal aspects of what would amount to an attempted hostile takeover of the Cessna Aircraft Company.
Mr. Cessna made it clear, however, that he was only interested in helping his two nephews reopen the factory. After the death of his friend Roy Liggett in 1933 while flying the Cessna CR­2A racer, Clyde had lost interest in manufacturing and selling airplanes but he still believed in aviation. Dwane and Dwight worked hard
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Dwane Wallace’s design of the C-34 was based on the Cessna “A” series of 1928, but incorporated upgrades that improved comfort and performance. (Textron Aviation)